Here Comes Civilization: The Complete Science Fiction of William Tenn Volume II (34 page)

"And you figure that if you help me find my friends, I'll help you save your mate from the sideshows on Earth? Well, I will,
if
—"

A big, complex
if
with as many tendrils as sucking ivy. If he lived long enough, and, if he did, if he would be sane enough—considering the agonizing last hour of Ricardo's Virus infection—to do anything constructive once he arrived at Pubina's jungle hideout. If a man, guided by a pterodactyl flying overhead, could pick his way on foot through a completely unexplored section of swamp and have enough juice left in him when he emerged to take the prize of the century away from the toughest collection of cutthroats on an extremely tough planet.

He clenched his fist as the cramps began in his left hand—the cramps that would spread slowly throughout his body until they ended in fatal convulsions some five hours from now. If a one-armed man could do all this, and do it with just one portable electroblast...

He cursed sharply, suddenly, as he realized he'd been holding the electroblast in his hand ever since he'd given the Heatwave thug that finishing jolt. That was after he'd been stabbed, after the man's first wild blast had burned Graff's antiseptic pouch into a mess of fused glass vials and blackened fabric. Without immediate application of the ten different antiseptic solutions.

But now! He inspected the bright metal of the coils anxiously. Might still do. Just might. He holstered the blaster with infinite tenderness and stooped over the blackened body that had almost disappeared into the mud. The man's electric gun was far too wet to be of any use, but Graff fumbled around in the soggy soil until he located the stiletto.

He straightened and grinned at the long blade, its steel already reddening from the pervasive rust of Venus.

"Where is the ship?" he asked. "The ship my friends were in?"

The terry nodded at a flat and soggy expanse. "Under there. Heatwave sky-shif wait here high uf. When New Kalamazoo shif come, Heatwave shif fly down fast ufon it. New Kalamazoo shif hit mud hard. This I see. Then Heatwave men take your friends away and New Kalamazoo shif sink in mud. Altogether are four Heatwave men, vesides Fuvina. You kill one, so now are only three, vesides Fuvina." The flying reptile breathed heavily again. Its scaly claws moved restlessly about on the branch.

Call that a break,
Graff decided. Four men to handle. Might have been twenty. Either Pubina had a smaller gang than had been believed, or he was playing the whole thing really smart. Toughs, especially Venusian ones, would really chop each other to merry hell over the first laboratory sample of a vaccine that promised immunity from Ricardo's Virus. A break to balance the loss of the ship.

Or was it? All he had was the terry's word. Could be that the entire yarn about his mate being captured for export to the terran amusement parks was nothing more than a story made up by Pubina to play on a colonist's sympathy. The terry might be working for Pubina some way or other. Who knew anything about pterodactyls? Who knew if they experienced anything like love or loyalty?

Graff stared at the unwinking reptilian eyes, at the tapering ugly beak, both completely devoid of expression. Add another
if
.

"All right, MacDuff," he said at last, "lead on."

"We go in vig curve," the terry told him, flapping its wings monstrously in preparation for flight. "Eight, nine hours for you. Other way take half time, vut—"

"Vut nothing!" Graff broke in. He massaged his left forearm, which had begun aching in sympathy with the hand. "Let's use the shortcut."

"It too hard for you, too dangerous! River cuts across—"

"So I'll get my feet wet. I'm not in a position to be worried by pneumonia. Let's head for the straight and narrow, MacDuff. I'm in a hurry."

—|—

The creature cocked its head to one side, dropped its wings in a gesture like a shrug, and moved off the fern in a soaring glide southward. When it was about three hundred feet up, it circled back to make certain that Graff was following.

Now if you ever go to Venus, the Polar Continent is probably where you'll live for the duration of your stay. Not only is its temperature and annual rainfall the lowest on the planet (which makes it just a shade more uncomfortable than the Amazonian jungle), but also it is the most heavily populated stretch of land—averaging close to one person every thirty square miles.

But if you find yourself on the Polar Continent, you will be advised, and well-advised, to stay away from the Southern Peninsula. This is not merely because it is a dank and deadly swamp, but chiefly because of the Black River, which winds through the peninsula, doubling back on itself, crossing through itself and becoming a tributary of itself a dozen times over, like a living surrealist corkscrew.

The Black River rises somewhere in the unscalable peaks of the San Mountains and comes roaring into the flatlands with a tremendous velocity. Just before reaching the peninsula, however, it is joined by the Zetzot River, and the two of them make a combination that is really in a hurry. Even if there were no rain at all (which is definitely not the case!), there would be a perpetual mist over the Southern Peninsula. And by the time the Black gets through doubling back on itself, giving itself a shove, so to speak—well, the reason no one knows exactly where the river empties into the Jefferson Sea is because the entire area is completely obscured by an opaque steaming fog which boils about for miles on either side.

Nor is that all. Certain animals like to wallow in the swamp created by the Black. And most of them are very large. Creatures which can survive in the swamp of the Southern Peninsula are quite tough, quite dangerous, and most uniquely suited to their environment. There are snakes and insects and carnivorous plants galore, not to mention the huge creatures who live in quicksand and have yet to be classified. One of the smallest animals of the peninsula is a dark little fish which swims back and forth in the Black itself. Venusian colonists have christened it the sardine, possibly because it is the size of a terrestrial sardine. Its habits, however, resemble those of the South American piranha. It travels in large schools and eats its way through anything.

All in all, the Southern Peninsular Swamp is an ideal home for a baron of crime who wants to get away from it all. The
all
doesn't include law, of course. On Venus, each man writes his own code of laws with the weapon he finds handiest.

The trouble was, Graff Dingle reflected as he found a ford and leaped across the screaming waters to the opposite bank, the trouble was that his folks and people like them had come to Venus to get away from lawlessness of the international kind, only to hit the inevitable individual lawlessness of a frontier.

Ordinarily, a frontier is slowly and surely transformed from rowdy wide-openness into suburban quietude by the increase in population—but population doesn't increase in really dangerous spots; that's why the people of New Kalamazoo worked so hard and so long to make their settlement large enough to merit the establishment of a university. A university would mean laboratories and research facilities to investigate Ricardo's Virus and all the lesser plagues peculiar to Venus, the plagues which took more lives yearly than jungle monsters and murderous Heatwavers combined; and a university would mean an increase in population, and law and order.

But Earth hadn't been interested. The study of Venusian diseases was an exotic subject hardly touched upon in Terran medical schools. Earth had been far too busy manufacturing artificial diseases to supplement atom bombs and hydrogen bombs.

Earth had, however, investigated the Venusian plagues with a view to their use in biological warfare. And out of the investigation, as an accident, as a byproduct, had come lobodin. A vaccine, not a serum. No good for Graff right now, for he was almost two full hours into the yellow death.

He worked his left arm around slowly, wincing with each turn, his eyes on the terry above him circling southward in the damp murky sky. At the same time, he tried to plant the broad soles of his boots on mud that wasn't quicksand, on rotten twigs that wouldn't crack too loudly. He knew his blood was now completely infiltrated with the obscene little yellow specks.

Pubina was probably trying to force Dr. Bergenson to inject the vaccine into him, ridiculing the old man's protests that all the bottle held was a starter culture, just enough so that with weeks of careful tending they might have sufficient vaccine to immunize the children.

It had been so expensive and difficult for the little colony to send Dr. Bergenson and Greta to Earth, where his reputation and connections had enabled him to wheedle a spoonful of the precious stuff out of a government laboratory! Pubina hadn't been able to get it, for all of his bribes and underworld contacts. But the bribes and underworld contacts had served another purpose: Pubina had discovered when the Bergensons were due to return—and that was all he really needed.

Graff noticed abruptly that the terry was falling rapidly back at him. Could he be trying to warn—

A shriek gave him the answer. Less than a quarter-mile away, a brontosaurus squatted its tremendous bulk in a shallow pool and regarded him from the end of an undulating snake-like neck. The animal screamed again, and Graff froze.

He watched the incredibly heavy reptile scramble to its feet and desperately tried to think. It wasn't a brontosaurus charge you had to be afraid of, but what usually traveled in its wake. A brontosaurus was herbivorous and, for all its size, extremely timid. It was ridiculous, possibly, but the mountain of living flesh was probably screaming in terror at the sight of him. You only had to control yourself and think while the great beast charged.

Because a brontosaurus meets danger by running into it. It is so massive that it is virtually unstoppable once in motion. You can blast its stupid little head off and it will keep running for another twenty minutes, powered by the bundle of nerve cells just under the spine. You just have to stand still and remember that it is much more frightened than you and is trying to trample you to death before you can bite it.

Graff stood his ground, bending his knees slowly, until the behemoth was only twenty-five feet away. Then he straightened suddenly and leaped off to the right, then again, further, and again, still further to the right.

—|—

Screaming insanely, the tons upon tons of flesh roared past, absolutely unable to halt itself. Its momentum carried it up a small hill, and Graff could hear it bellowing down the other side. It wouldn't return.

But something else was on its way. There's always a meat-eater in the wake of a brontosaurus. Sometimes there are several. The
kind
of carnivore was very important to Graff right now. He had an electroblast which he wasn't certain would work in an emergency and whose diminished power he'd certainly need later. And he had a stiletto.

He heard the beast thumping its way through the luxuriant weeds of the swamp. A moment later it had broken into the clear, had seen him, and was loping toward him easily with all the confidence of a powerful creature which sees an easy meal in sight.

A shata. No larger than a terran wolf. But if a brontosaurus can be said to be all body-bulk and very little head, the shata is just the reverse. Twelve rows of teeth, and jaws which open wide enough to admit a sheep. Regretfully and a little uncertainly, Graff holstered the electroblast and balanced the stiletto on his palm. He'd hunted lots of shata in his time, but never with a knife.

He began weaving about, conscious of his awkwardness. The knots in his left side constantly made him misjudge his body and slip off balance. And here he was hoping to take four men at a time—

As he expected, the shata was confused by his peculiar motion. It slowed to a dead stop, then slunk before him, growling. It moved in half-circles, coming in closer each time. Graff waited until it was directly in front of him. He stood still, and immediately the shata sprang, jaws gaping.

The palate. Just behind the palate is the brain. It means sticking half your arm into a fearful set of jaws, but do it right.

Graff let the rigid, distended head slide off the knife and into the mud. He wiped his blade on the green fur, standing out like so many spikes, and grimaced. A nice specimen. Shatas were good eating, too.

Well, he wasn't a hunter any more. He was a dead man looking for a coffin. He was swamp-bait if he collapsed in this weedy muck.

The terry skimmed by with his head turned questioningly.

"I'm fine," Graff reassured him. "How much farther?"

"Vetween one and two of your hours." The lizard-bird curved up and ahead, leathery wings beating slowly.

Graff plodded on. He should arrive with about an hour and a half of life left. That would give him a half-hour to an hour at most in which to operate consciously and more or less effectively. After that, there would be half an hour of writhing agony, leading into unconsciousness. After that, he would be dead.

He'd hate to leave life. It meant leaving the thrill of tracking your quarry on the bracing slope of Mount Catiline where the dodle breeds in the Season of Wind-Driven Rains; it meant leaving a wild new world that was just a-borning as far as humanity was concerned; it meant leaving Greta Bergenson.

It also meant leaving wealth. Now that lobodin had been developed, the colonization of Venus would begin in earnest. He was the last alive of a numerous family who had homesteaded half the Galertan Archipelago into their possession. He was heir to all the rich, fertile, and deserted islands his father and brothers had claimed. With Ricardo's Virus taken care of, future Venusian farmers would pay well for those scattered spots of soil in the Jefferson Sea.

Following the terry, he hit the river again. He started downstream, looking for a ford as he had before. The Black was rather wide at this point, and he wasted fifteen precious minutes before he found a bank that curved near enough to the opposite one to permit a leap. He went into the weeds to get a running start.

A shadow plummeted past him.

"Vack," the terry screamed. "Get vack! Don't jumf here. Gridnik!"